Category Archives: Samhein

What Is Remembered Does Not Die


ON PASSING A GRAVEYARD

May perpetual light shine upon
The faces of all who rest here.
May the lives they lived
Unfold further in spirit.
May the remembering earth
Mind every memory they brought.
May the rains from the heavens
Fall gently upon them.
May the wildflowers and grasses
Whisper their wishes into the light.
May we reverence the village of presence
In the stillness of this silent field.

— John O Donohue

Picture found here

Hymn to Hekate


Swathed in red is Hekate.
Hooded in red is Hekate.
Red-hemmed Artemis, lift aloft your burning torch,
And bring the trumpet of the nocturnal hunt.
The flow of life is in the hands of Hekate,
And her burning light guides the way.
Terror-ridden roar of the bull is the trumpets blast,
And the hounds bay in search of their prey.
The beasts of the woods shudder in their homes,
And a scream fills the night air.
None is safe from the nocturnal hunt,
And Hekate guides the host of souls to their new abode.
The light of Hekate does not flicker,
But illuminates the halls of the dead,
And exalts in the company of fair Persephone.
Bloodied-red Hekate, we leave your monthly feast,
At the site of your throne.
Red-swathed Hekate has all roads lain before her,
And the merciful Goddess greets those unfortunates who share her plate.
The touch of Hekate is merciful, and in her embrace we depart.

~Lykeia in Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hekate, pub. by Bibliotheca Alexandrina

PIcture found here.

Blessed Samhein to You and Yours.


The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come to love,
bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of the world!

~Wendell Berry

Picture found here.

An Excerpt from Robbie Burns


May Your Samhein Be No Less Full Blyhte

Now over a waterfall the steam plays,
As through the glen it meandered;
Sometimes round a rocky cliff it strays,
Sometimes in a eddy it dimpled it;
Sometimes glittered to the nightly rays,
With bickering, dancing dazzle;
Sometimes hid underneath the hill sides,
Below the spreading hazel
Unseen that night.

Among the ferns, on the hillside,
Between her and the moon,
The Devil, or else a young cow in the open,
Got up and gave a croon:
Poor Leezie's heart almost leaped the sheath;
Near lark high she jumped,
But missed a foot, and in the pool
Out over the ears she plumped
With a plunge that night.

In order, on the clean hearth-stone,
The small wooden vessel three are ranged;
And every time great care is taken
To see them duly changed:
Old uncle John, who wedlock's joys
Since Mar's-year (1715) did desire,
Because he got the empty dish three times,
He heaved them on the fire
In wrath that night.

With merry songs, and friendly talk,
I wager they did not weary;
And wondrous tales, and funny jokes -
Their sports were cheap and cheery:
Till buttered sows, with fragrant smoke,
Set all their tongues a wagging;
Then, with a social glass of liquor,
They parted off careering
Full blythe that night.

************

May you dance the Spiral Dance and may the veils part gently for you.

Picture found here.

Honoring The (Sometimes Dysfunctional) Ancestors


Just a few days now until Samhein. I sit in a shaft of weak sunlight in my leaf-strewn garden and wonder, as, I guess, all old people do: "How did another year slip by so quickly?

Maybe more than any other holiday, Samhein has a huge component of fun, generally related to the coincident secular holiday. Scratch a Pagan and you'll likely find someone who loves costumes, the dark, all things "spooky." And, a large part of showing up for Samhein, being fully present in the holy day, involves our relationship with "The Ancestors." For many Pagans, that part is fun, as well. Lovingly-crafted ancestor altars, with pictures and mementos of the beloved dead, are artfully arranged. Food and music and stories that remind us of our parents, grandparents, and other now-dead relatives make up a large part of many Samhein rituals and divination and other forms of communication are used, here while the veils are thin.

Yet, for some Pagans, those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families, these practices can become fraught, rather than fun. One coping strategy that I've adopted is to broaden my definition of the term "Ancestors." I've done this in two different ways, over time.

First, through trance work,I've gotten to know some Ancestors from my deep past, especially one old, old woman who survived a lot of very cold winters inside a cave. I can draw strength and inspiration from those ancestors that I'm not able to find in my immediate predecessors. When I call upon the Element of Earth, I remember that Earth contains the bones of my ancestors, all of whom were survivors. When I ground, I can feel the layers of life under my feet; I twist my own roots deep around the roots of my own past.

Second, I've come to realize that I have any number of "Ancestors of the Heart" to whom I am not genetically related (any more than we are all, of course, Sons and Daughters of African Eve). Primary among these, I count Dorothy Parker, for her deep romanticism and idealism which she defended with her deep cynicism. She was one of my first models for how to be a smart aleck in this world and began my love affair with poetry. I count here, too, fictional characters: Susan Sowerby from The Secret Garden, Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane, Meg Murray and Mrs. Who from a Wrinkle in Time.

And, so when I sit on Samhein to honor The Ancestors, I will honor my own version. And, as I've written before, I hope to be:

reminded of one of my favorite passages, ever, from Ursula LeGuin. A woman importunes her ancestors for help. "Oh, it's That One. In trouble, again," the Ancestors chuckle to each other. It's what I imagine some Viking thrall saying to some settler from ancient Rus and to the barefoot old crone, the one who died lighting fires at the edge of the cave to keep the winter wolves away from the smell of placenta and mother's milk. "Oh, it's That One. In trouble, again."
But I think they'll say it with a friendly chuckle.

And I will renew my own pledge to do as Katrina Messenger once told me Jung taught that we must do: I will continue to know, dance with, and release the energy of my own shadows so that, to the best of my abilities, I do not project them onto the next generations. Some bits of my family's heritage will hopefully die with me. It's one way that I can honor those with whom I prefer not to spend time, across the veils.

Here's Angela Raincatcher and Thalia Took dealing with some of their own ancestral issues. How do you deal with yours? Who are your Ancestors of the Heart? What would an altar to them look like?

Picture found here.

Raking


Now that Mabon's come and gone, now that we're heading madly towards Samhein, it's that time in the Gardening Year when we begin to clear stuff out. One of my magical Sisters (whose home is deep in a grove of gorgeous old trees) and I were joking at brunch today about how we're already into that time of year when raking up leaves becomes a primary chore. (Her yard is already much more carefully-raked than mine. It's only going to get worse between now and late November when my white oaks finally drop their last leaves.) And all those dead leaves (and, in my case, acorns) have to GO SOMEWHERE; here at Hecate's Cottage, they go into big brown paper bags that the county will come by and pick up to turn into mulch. But the leaves aren't the only things that need to be gotten out of the garden. There are dead, branchy stems left over from the now-harvested-and-made-into-frozen-pesto basil. There are old stalks from daisies and obedient plant and Asiatic lilies and anemones. (Compost bin, here they come!) There are wisteria vines that have been pruned back and there are pots of brugmansia to be cut way back and brought inside for the coming Winter.

And, at the same time, it's now the season to do a lot of planting in anticipation of the Spring and Summer that we hope, as did our great-great-great-great-many-times-great grandmothers, will certainly (yes?) come. So this past week I worked w/ Landscape Guy and his crew to put in two new trees, innumerable hostas and astilbes, some new drancunculus, Darkness iris, and giant white alliums. Right now, I'm staring at a box of 75 snowdrop bulbs, sitting on the table, tapping their fingernails, and saying, "Well? When ARE you going to get us into the ground?" With so much new stuff, it's still a time of watering; I likely won't have to put the hoses away and shut off the pipes to the outside until nearly Yule. Until then, new roots are still growing and water is important.

Finally, this time of year is the beginning of that season that, if we're honest (and, we're not; most gardeners lie worse than golfers, fishermen, hunters, tennis players), many gardeners love every bit as much as we love High Summer: the Time of the Winter Plan. It's a perfect period (you can do it while raking! or sitting in front of the fire!) to mull over what worked (marigolds in the herb bed), what didn't work (Burpee's Summerlong basil, everything from White Flower Farms), what you want to try next year (black poppies and white peonies), what new adventure you'll embark upon when, sometime between Yule and Imbolc, you give in to the garden porn of the catalogs and begin buying new seeds, seedlings, etc. Just now, hope springs eternal, everything seems possible (maybe just a dozen new ostrich ferns and that corner WOULD look perfect; next year, I'll find a place to put wormwood where it won't kill off the surrounding plants; if we "just" move about a hundred day lilies out of the gardenia beds and into the woodland . . . .")

And, of course, as I plant, and pull up, and water, and rake, (and try to ignore the snowdrops), I think about how much this liturgical season mimics (as, how, based upon it as it is, upon what goes on in the garden, could it not?) what is going on outside. As above, so below. As outside, so inside. As in the manifest world, so in the world of the psyche. Just now, with the veils so thin, my ancestors and deceased friends and lovers show up and offer their advice. I'm likely the only woman in my neighborhood raking, saying, "Shut up!" bagging leaves, shouting, "Who asked you?" pulling up stems, murmuring, "Well, OK, you may have a point."

I adopted the practice last year of setting an intentional word to organize my goals and objectives for the coming year. This year, the word has been "Vitality" -- an attempt to introduce more health and more energy into every area of my life. For the coming year, I'm pretty sure that the word is going to be "Elegant," which, for me, implies, a serious editing, a cutting away of all that is extraneous. I meditate upon that word from Samhein until Yule. Just after Yule, I make a screen-saver for my computer with images, words, and phrases that convey my word and I write a global list of goals for the coming year.

Between Yule and Imbolc, I work on a more logical, strategic plan.

What are you raking up and throwing into the compost bin? What are you planting just now and watering? What plans are you hatching? What does this season mean for you?

Photo by the author; if you copy, please link back.

You Should Read This


You Should. If you have the gift of eyes, or if you have the gift of technology that brings computer postings to your ears or fingertips, you should "read" this.
I kneel down and peer at these tiny orbs of water. Wet-kneed, I see this world again, but tiny, upside-down, and clear, washed new for this day. Who scattered these microcosmic scrying balls amongst the grass for me today?

Oddly, the other day, I had a dream about kneeling down, wet-kneed (in an, ahem, different context) that has stayed with me all week, tugging at my awareness, whispering at odd times, "No, you're not done with me, nor I (and the dreamed-of-one, slipped beyond the now-thin veil) with you."

I'm sure there are some, but I don't know a Witch who does not love this veil-thin, death-tinged time of year.

This morning we woke up and, after dressing G/Son in cozy cotton clothing against the morning chill and setting the kettle on for a hot cup of tea to warm my old, knitting-swollen fingers, I was making breakfast; I asked G/Son (doing art at the kitchen nook table and drinking the juice from a CSA orange), "So, did you have any dreams last night?" G/Son said, "No, Nonna. I was trying to sleep. But I know you dreamed about a man who was making too much noise and about a river." And, of course, that was, at least on the surface, what I'd dreamed about.

Thin veils, in so many ways.

What about it do you love?

Picture found here.

A Month of Contradictions


October Journey


Traveller take heed for journeys undertaken in the dark of
the year.
Go in the bright blaze of Autumn's equinox.
Carry protection against ravages of a sun-robber, a vandal,
a thief.
Cross no bright expanse of water in the full of the
moon.
Choose no dangerous summer nights;
no heavy tempting hours of spring;
October journeys are safest, brightest, and best.

I want to tell you what hills are like in October
when colors gush down mountainsides
and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves,
I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame
and joy,
how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible
until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering
plain--
a glowing caldron full of jewelled fire;
the emerald earth a dragon's eye
the poplars drenched with yellow light
and dogwoods blazing bloody red.
Travelling southward earth changes from gray rock to green
velvet.
Earth changes to red clay
with green grass growing brightly
with saffron skies of evening setting dully
with muddy rivers moving sluggishly.
In the early spring when the peach tree blooms
wearing a veil like a lavender haze
and the pear and plum in their bridal hair
gently snow their petals on earth's grassy bosom below
then the soughing breeze is soothing
and the world seems bathed in tenderness,
but in October
blossoms have long since fallen.
A few red apples hang on leafless boughs;
wind whips bushes briskly
And where a blue stream sings cautiously
a barren land feeds hungrily.
An evil moon bleeds drops of death.
The earth burns brown.
Grass shrivels and dries to a yellowish mass.
Earth wears a dun-colored dress
like an old woman wooing the sun to be her lover,
be her seetheart and her husband bound in one.
Farmers heap hay in stacks and bind corn in shocks
against the biting breath of frost.
The train wheels hum, "I am going home, I am going home,
I am moving toward the South."
Soon cypress swamps and muskrat marshes
and black fields touched with cotton will appear.
I dream again of my childhood land
of a neighbor's yard with a redbud tree
the smell of pine for turpentine
an Easter dress, a Christmas eve
and winding roads from the top of a hill.
A music sings within my flesh
I feel the pulse within my throat
my heart fills up with hungry fear
while hills and flatlands stark and staring
before my dark eyes sad and haunting
appear and disappear.
Then when I touch this land again
the promise of a sun-lit hour dies.
The greeness of an apple seems
to dry and rot before my eyes.
The sullen winter rains
are tears of grief I cannot shed.
The windless days are static lives.
The clock runs down
timeless and still.
The days and nights turn hours to years
and water in a gutter marks the circle of another world
hating, resentful, and afraid,
stagnant, and green, and full of slimy things.

~Margaret Walker

Photo by the blogger; if you copy, please link back.

John Barleycorn Must Die


I've been thinking about the interview linked below in which Lierre Keith discusses her growing awareness that plants have a form of sentience, volition, and ability to communicate. She recounts how, as a vegan, she didn't want to accept this awareness because it meant that, in order to survive, she had to kill something sentient.*

We have (and Earth knows, I'm not the first to discuss this) such a shadow relationship with Death in Western culture. To a greater extent than at any other time or place in human history, our way of life is built upon and requires massive amounts of death. We spend billions of dollars on redundant weapons, even when we say that we don't have money for schools, or roads, or the green energy programs that might save the planet. We are, pace Mr. Orwell, always at war with someone. We cause the extinction of species after species. We kill forest after river after ocean and shrug it off as just a cost of doing business. We kill off native peoples whenever and wherever they "get in our way" (by which, we mean, "have been living forever in a place that we now want"). Our movies are full of death (preferably accomplished by huge explosions or major car crashes -- nope, no sexual symbolism there) and our children amuse themselves for hours with video games in which the object is to kill other people.

And, yet, Death is the great unmentionable. We have moved the harvesting of the plants we eat and the slaughter of the animals whose flesh we consume out of sight. We send our old people away to die in hospitals or nursing homes. We won't even use the word "death" -- we say that someone "passed on," or "went to their final rest." And we want, rather desperately, as Keith did, to pretend that somehow we can have the life that we have without ever causing any Death.

What happens, though, when we face up to the fact, as Keith did, that everything is alive, that everything is aware, that we must, truly, cause some death in order to live? The Randian response is to shrug, announce that only the strong survive, and to become even more willing to wreak death and destruction. After all, if even picking an apple off a tree involves taking from a sentient being, then why not take the land away from the forest, why not dump chemicals into the Danube? Why not make money selling games to children that teach them that it's fun to blow up other people? Head to McDonalds and have a triple bacon burger!

Another response, though, is to recognize the gift of the slaughtered animal, the harvested corn. That response might require, as Derrick Jensen suggests, that, when we kill a salmon, we become responsible to Salmon. It suggests that animals be raised and slaughtered humanely (to coin a phrase) and with gratitude for their sacrifice. It suggests that we not grow crops in huge monoculture factory farms and that we not drench them in pesticide and petroleum-based fertilizer. It suggests that we spend time in meditation and religious ritual, coming into right relationship with Death, with our planet, our landbase, our food. And if that interferes with the cost of doing business (aka imposing externalities), then it is business that must adjust and sacrifice.

As we head into Samhein, this area of our relationship with Death is one I'd like to see more Pagan groups incorporate into their observations. Our religion, more than any other Western religion, is at least willing to worship the relationship between life and death, as well as to focus upon the interconnectedness of all beings. We could, I think, begin to help our culture to come into a better relationship with reality, which could, in turn, help us to come into a better relationship with our planet and the other beings who share it with us.

How squeamish does Death make you? Do you still believe that you can live on this planet without causing Death? How does the traditional "Rule of Three" both recognize and obscure the truth about the relationship between our lives and death? What, realistically, can you change in order to live in better relationship with Life, Death, Earth, Food? What rituals would help you to do this?


*I am not making any judgments here about what people eat or don't eat. It's interesting to me how our culture considers eating to be such a moral issue; people feel free to judge other people for what they eat, how they eat, how much they eat or don't eat, etc. It's almost impossible to read a newspaper or magazine without finding articles about how one "should" eat and it's almost impossible to mention, say, veganism without starting a war about how people "should" eat. And yet, the deep moral questions behind our food production system go unmentioned. Good sign that there are some shadow issues involved.

Picture found here.

Wish You Were Here




As the veil thins and we whirl ever closer to Samhein, our thoughts turn to those whom we have lost over the past year. At least several hundred brown pelicans, who depended upon the Gulf of Mexico for their food, habitat, and breeding grounds, were killed and injured by the BP-caused oil spill this year.

The brown pelican is so important to Louisiana that it is one of the mascots of Tulane University and is on both Tulane's and Louisiana State University's seal. But BP's profits were more important.

What is remembered does not die.